Housekeeping—Robinson

Housekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson (author of Gilead and Home)
(Farrar Straus Giroux, 1980, 219pp.)

Where do the homeless come from? Are they born so? Or does their destiny evolve? In this her first novel, Marilynne Robinson melds words into a dreamlike revelation of the makings of a transient mindset. Through the eyes of a little girl Ruth, speaking for herself and her sister, we follow the effects of loss of family and isolation on individuals in the larger context of a whole community haunted by the same. The place is Fingerbone, an isolated western town on the shores of a deep lake crossed by a railroad trestle bridge. The story begins with the retelling of the tragic derailing of the train that buried its occupants in this lake, including the grandfather of the storyteller. Here the dysfunction begins with the solitary upbringing of Ruth’s own mother and sisters… Following the subsequent drowning of her own mother in this same lake, Ruth is mothered in succession by her aging grandmother, two spinster great-aunts, and finally an unstable aunt whose idea of housekeeping shapes the rest of the book.

The author is a magician with words and evokes not only a somber dreamlike mood but recreates the very mental distortions of the lonely. Losing touch with reality, denying need, welcoming transience all become part of the reader’s experience vicariously. It is not a read that will brighten your day but it will give you a new way of seeing the next wanderer that crosses your path.

Having read Gilead and Home and loved Marilynne’s capacity to capture mood with words, I thought I knew what I was getting into when I found Housekeeping, her first novel, on the library shelf. I was disappointed. Not because she does not evoke mood with deftly used language and a dream-like point-of-view—a first person omniscient narrative. My disappointment lay in not fully comprehending the mental states painted with words. Her skill in getting into a character’s mind and tracing its workings in words is a wonder! I felt barred from going there by my own want of experience. A large part of the delight of reading for me is reading about myself or my experience, resonating with ‘Yes, that’s how it really is’, seeing in words what I could never have written… This novel was too utterly strange and ‘other’ for me to enter.

But I don’t regret the reading of it. It is like I have seen the evolution of a homeless person, traced their origins, felt to a small extent their loss and metamorphosis. I have seen, if not understood, their values—the disdain for ‘housekeeping’ as I picture it, the denial of want, of hunger, of cold, of pain, the inability to relish comfort. I was struck by the possibility of learning not to feel.

“I learned an important thing in the orchard that night, which was that if you do not resist the cold, but simply relax and accept it, you no longer feel the cold as discomfort.”

“I was hungry enough to begin to learn that hunger has its pleasures, and I was happily at ease in the dark, and in general, I could feel that I was breaking the tethers of need, one by one.”

Loss, loneliness, aloneness, solitariness—these are the breeding grounds for insanity. This novel is haunted by the ghosts borderlining this state. It is sad, lonely, like a bad dream, blurring reality with imagined reality. At once I want to shut it and put it on a far away shelf and yet the glimpses it has given me into another world cannot be so easily re-shelved.

--DW